Letters

June 21, 2007

Mayor's Tactics

Hurt City Schools

I am responding to the remarks of Mayor Timothy Stewart regarding the deep cuts in the ranks of school district teachers that seem certain to occur when the board of education reconciles the proposed budget with the appropriation to the board in his budget tonight.

While the mayor employs a tactic popularized by certain politicians of saying things over and over again in hopes that they will be accepted as true, there is no mystery in the numbers. If year after year the budget appropriation to the board is below the increase in fixed costs associated with running the district, services to students get eroded.

The board is faced with tight budgets that hover at or near the state mandated minimum expenditure requirement and fail to meet the increase in fixed costs of running the district. In recent years, the board has eliminated all cleaning aide positions in the district and reduced custodial, security, secretarial and administrator positions to minimum functional levels. New Britain schools rank at or near the bottom of the state in terms of class size, administrator-to-teacher ratios and administrator-to-student ratios.

Further, the board engaged in many adjustments that have allowed us to absorb city budget increases that are below the increase in the fixed costs of the district. For example, with Stewart's assistance, the district transportation contract was renegotiated last year to defer increases from last year's budget. This year's budget now must absorb some of those deferred costs.

While aware of the city's financial circumstances, the board strives to provide the highest quality education possible to the students and families of New Britain. The mayor, among others, has taken to describing the board as a kind of Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling in over our efforts to stem the losses to the district and to preserve needed resources year after year. Perhaps an analogy better than a falling sky is a bleeding patient.

The poorest students and families in Connecticut are concentrated in communities with the least ability to generate revenue based on the local property tax for essential educational and municipal services. We can all agree that this problem is larger than New Britain. I hope we can agree to acknowledge the realities this creates. Unfortunately, like the proverbial ostrich, the mayor has his head in the sand.